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The Cost of Going to College, Then and Now

Re “The Hidden Costs of Higher Ed,” by Noah S. Bernstein (Op-Ed, Aug. 22): The main cost drivers in higher education are not the outsourcing of tuition management or the prepayment of tuition by wealthy families but the fact that its business model has been obsolete for decades. Even with transformative technologies, higher education remains a labor-intensive industry.

We must redesign it to bring costs down while we preserve the culture-creating and civilizing good that flows from it, by taking these steps:

¶Create a new academic compact that allows full-time faculty members to direct instruction and adjuncts to deliver it.

¶Stop judging professors as individuals and treat faculty members in departments as true teams.

¶Accept that there is nothing immutable about the 120-credit bachelor’s degree, and dispense with elective course requirements that only inflate the cost of some programs.

¶Work with regional accreditors to focus on output quality, not on measures like numbers of full-time faculty members.

All of this will liberate creativity, improve teaching and learning and bring down costs. It will also reshape the culture and style of the best higher-education system on the planet.

“The Hidden Costs of Higher Ed” reminded me that when I entered Columbia College as a freshman in 1942 the tuition was $190 a semester. There was a $10 gym fee. Textbooks cost about $10. Fare back and forth from home was a dime.